1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a safety device for doors, and more particularly to a protection device to prevent fingers or hands from being injured by doors.
2. Description of Related Art
It is very common that people carelessly have their hands or fingers injured by doors, especially for kids who are playing or not looked after.
An article, written by N. V. Doraiswamy etc., titled “Isolated finger injuries in Children-incidence and aetiology”, published in an international journal <<Injury>> (Injury, Int. J. Care Injured, Volume 31, Issue 8, October 2000, Pages 571˜573) disclosed that:
In a study, details were recorded prospectively in a specifically designed questionnaire for all children presenting to the Accident and Emergency Department with isolated finger injuries over a period of 6 months. Among the 426 injuries in 283 children, most occurred at home (59%) more in the <5 year age group (38%) . . . “Jamming/crushing” was the commonest reason (48%), mostly caused by a child (59%) at the living room door (32%) and more commonly at the hinge side (49%) . . . It is less common for a child to cause self-injury while closing the door . . . But the present study indicates that a child closing the door is common—(60%), although adults are also responsible for (25%) some of the incidents . . . Both children and adults should be educated about causation, reiterating that damage to fingers can be prevented or reduced by observing safety measures.
A door stopper can be used for preventing the door from being closed. However, when the door stopper is not installed in a correct position to block the door, an accident will easily occur.
A finger guard for doors has been invented. The finger guard has a bumper mounted on a lock side or a hinge side of a door to prevent the door from closing. For closing the door, a user should remove the bumper from the door. In other words, the bumper must be mounted on the door for taking effect when the user wants to prevent the door from closing. Therefore, once the bumper is not in position due to the user's neglect or carelessness, the probability of finger injuries still exists.
A finger protection device for doors is disclosed in a DE Patent No. DE3626924, granted to Domer Jorg Dr. -Ing etc., and includes elongated strip-like or bar-like covering bodies which are fixed on door-gap openings at the hinge side of the doors by thin and flexible connecting means to cover the door-gap openings. Although this device prevented fingers from being nipped by the door-gaps at the hinge side of the doors, the fingers may still be nipped by the door-gap openings on the lock side of the doors. Moreover, because this device extends from the top of the door to the bottom of the door, it is inconvenient to install this device.
A door finger guard is disclosed in U.K. Patent No. GB2218449, granted to Steven Swaddle etc. The door finger guard includes a bridge-linking strip member being composed of two end portions and two middle portions. The two middle portions attach to each other by a hinge portion, and the two end portions are secured on a door and a frame respectively to cover door-gap openings on the hinge side of the door. Because the components of the device are integrally made of plastic, the device has a short using life, and is easy to be deformed or broken. Moreover, this invention still has the disadvantage of allowing the door-gap openings on the lock side of the door to nip the fingers.
U.K. Patent No. GB2306538 to Stephen Robert Webb also discloses a door finger guard. This device has a structure similar to the invention as described above, and its primary object is to cover the door-gap openings on the hinge side of the door, so the same problems appear in the device.
Therefore, the invention provides a finger protection device for doors to mitigate or obviate the aforementioned problems.